For Your Amusement

This past Saturday was the best day of the year for the kids!  They look forward to Dividend Day all year long and the only wrinkle in Saturday's fabric was that Ethan had a cross country meet at noon.  Which he was NOT happy about.  We worked around it the best we could and, in the end, split things up.  I took the younger 4 in the morning, and Scott and Ethan joined up with us later on.  We intermingled for a few hours in the afternoon before I left with the younger 3 around dinner time, and then Scott stayed with Ethan and Grace until closing.

Hahahahahaha -- look at that face.

As I have documented before, I am not the hugest fan of amusement parks, but being almost 8 months pregnant was the perfect excuse to not have to ride on any rides.  Hahaha.  Alex followed in my footsteps for the majority of the day, but by the end, he was brave enough to try a few "big" rides with Scott sitting next to him.  :)

The bumper cars were the first thing he chickened out on.

And you can forget about him even THINKING about going on the space buggies.  :)

We ran into family friends while there.

And we finally have a rider!!  The "race cars" were the first ride Alex would brave.  

And the train is always an Alex favorite.  Hahaha.

Even more exciting than the rides, was the petting zoo!  Hahaha. At least to Alex.  He went through 3 rounds of feeding the animals before the girls caught on to how much fun it was, too.  To be honest, I was quite surprised that Alex was terrified of rides, but NOT scared at all to have random animals eating {and slobbering} out of his hand.  Hahaha.

Unlike last year (where it was really chilly and cold), the weather for the day THIS year was perfect, if weird.  Hahaha.  It's like we experienced 3 different days all in one!  I was worried it was going to be too hot, but when we first got there it was windy and overcast and not hot at all!  Around lunch time -- when we were finally all together -- it started drizzling and turned cooler, but by the end of the day we had sunshine and blue skies and delightful weather all around.  :)   All in all, it was quite a lovely day.

 THIS turned out to be Alex's favorite ride.  He kept laughing through the whole thing.  It was quite adorable if I do say so myself.

And that was our day!  An added bonus to a full day of walking around an amusement park, was that once we were home, Alex and Jane fell asleep rather quickly at bedtime, and STAYED asleep all night long!  Hip hop hooray!!  Hahahaha.  I was nice and worn out, too, and fell asleep quite easily that night as well.

 My super people.

 And a family photo after lunch.

If you've stuck with the post this long, you deserve a medal!  Thank you and goodnight.  It is officially past my bedtime.  :)